Ed Ames

Ed Ames, born Edmund Dantes Urick on July 9, 1927, in Malden, Massachusetts, was an American singer and actor whose career spanned decades in recording, television, and theater. The youngest of nine children born to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants Sarah and David Urick, he grew up in modest circumstances and received a classical and operatic musical education at Boston Latin School. While still in high school, he and his brothers formed a vocal quartet that competed successfully throughout the Boston area.

Three of the brothers eventually relocated to New York City, where bandleader Art Mooney hired them. Playwright Abe Burrows advised the siblings to rename their group, and they became the Ames Brothers. The group signed with Decca Records in 1947, though a musicians' union ban in 1948 limited their output to three singles and one session backing Russ Morgan. They subsequently signed with Coral Records, a Decca subsidiary, and scored their first major hit with the double-sided release of "Rag Mop" and "Sentimental Me." Moving to RCA Victor, the Ames Brothers sustained commercial success throughout the 1950s with recordings including "You, You, You," "It Only Hurts For a Little While," and "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane," and made frequent appearances on network television variety programs, including a brief 15-minute series of their own in 1955.

When the Ames Brothers disbanded in the early 1960s, Ed Ames pursued acting, training at the Herbert Berghof School. He appeared in off-Broadway productions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and The Fantasticks before moving to Broadway. Between 1961 and 1963, he starred in Carnival! and appeared in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which he played Chief Bromden opposite Kirk Douglas. He also performed in the national touring company of Carnival. Talent scouts from 20th Century Fox saw him in the Cuckoo's Nest production and cast him as Mingo, a Cherokee tribesman, on the NBC series Daniel Boone alongside Fess Parker. The character's full name was Caramingo, and his father was an English officer, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, portrayed by Walter Pidgeon. In a first-season episode, Ames also played Mingo's villainous twin brother, Taramingo.

During his run on Daniel Boone, Ames developed tomahawk-throwing skills that led to one of the most widely remembered moments in late-night television history. On April 27, 1965, appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Ames threw a tomahawk at a chalk-outlined wooden cowboy panel and struck the figure squarely in the groin. The audience's prolonged laughter prompted Carson's ad-libbed remarks, "I didn't even know you were Jewish" and "Welcome to Frontier Bris." The clip became a recurring feature on Carson's annual highlight programs and subsequent television blooper specials.

Ames returned to recording as a solo artist in 1965, releasing "Try to Remember" as his first RCA Victor chart single, which reached No. 73 on the pop charts and No. 17 on the Adult Contemporary listing. His 1967 recording of "My Cup Runneth Over" reached No. 8 on the pop chart and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. Additional Adult Contemporary hits followed, including "Time, Time," "When the Snow Is on the Roses," and "Timeless Love," the last of which was written by Buffy Sainte-Marie. He reached the pop Top 20 once more with "Who Will Answer?" in 1968. That same year he sang "Ballad of the War Wagon" for the John Wayne film The War Wagon. His baritone recording of "Do You Hear What I Hear?" became a perennial presence in holiday radio programming.

Later in his career, Ames headlined productions on the Kenley Players circuit, appearing in Shenandoah in 1976, 1979, and 1986, Fiddler on the Roof in 1977, South Pacific in 1980, Camelot in 1981, and Man of La Mancha in 1984. While maintaining his professional career, he earned a bachelor's degree in theater and cinema arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975. From 1968 to 1987, he held a partial ownership stake in the Phoenix Suns basketball team, and he served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Zionist Organization of America.

Ames married Sarita Cacheiro in 1947, and the couple had three children: Sonya, Ronald, and Linda. They divorced in 1973. He married Jeanne Arnold Saviano in 1998, a marriage that lasted until his death. Ames died of Alzheimer's disease at his Beverly Hills home on May 21, 2023, at the age of 95, and is buried at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Westwood, California.